The formation and training of ministers in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is undergoing significant change to meet the evolving challenges of university ministry. Based on the educational preferences, generational distinctives, and missional contexts of InterVarsity’s interdenominational staff, the author and collaborators have developed a curriculum that deliberately centers methodology, instead of content, in its pedagogy. The curriculum guides staff to repeatedly practice the three dimensions of this method – deepen, diversify, and discern. Adapted from John Frame’s tri-perspectival approach to theology, and as a pedagogically principled response to concerns and stereotypes about theology as obscurantist, technique-driven, and colonizing, we propose the following:
Dimension 1: Theology deepens our spiritual intimacy with and commitment to God
Dimension 2: Theology emerges from the diversity of God’s people expressed in their traditions
Dimension 3: Theological discernment in community and in the Spirit guides ministry decisions
This paper will sketch the context of ministry at non-sectarian colleges and universities, highlighting the contemporary, emerging challenges engaged by the Three-Dimensional method. Next, the curriculum, its contours, and its deployment will be illustrated and explained. The place of InterVarsity’s evangelical doctrinal commitments deserves special attention. That is, the relation between doctrinal and theological formation of ministers will be explored. Doctrine, notably, is not one of the dimensions of the method. Finally, early survey data demonstrate learning and ministry outcomes that shape future trajectories for this approach will be discussed. Our findings illustrate the critical need to reposition theological method in the formation of ministers.